


Selina's Story

by SusanaR



Series: Impossible Woman [1]
Category: Batman (Comics), Catwoman (Comics), DCU
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe, Backstory, F/M, Humor, Mystery, Romance, childhood tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-14
Updated: 2015-06-14
Packaged: 2018-04-04 08:43:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4131403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SusanaR/pseuds/SusanaR
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One night didn't make Selina's life, but it did alter the course of it.  If her parents had never been murdered, Catwoman might never have been born. But the one did not directly cause the other, and Selina does not deceive herself about that. </p><p>But that is, perhaps, getting ahead of the story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Selina's Story

**Author's Note:**

> Quote: 
> 
> "Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat." - Mark Twain

One night didn't make my life, but it did alter the course of it. If my parents had never been murdered, Catwoman might never have been born. But the one did not directly cause the other, and I do not deceive myself that it did. 

But that is, perhaps, getting ahead of the story. 

My father was an insurance agent. Not an actuary or a salesman or a manager, but rather an investigator. And he was very, very good at his job. And almost inflexibly moral. In my mother's eyes, it was one of his failings. With a woman's perspective, I can look back and see that it might have been at least a part of what first drew her to him, and what kept her with him. Mother was beautiful. Dark hair and dark eyes, she looked like Vivien Leigh yet possessed the sex appeal of Gretta Garbo. Daddy was ordinary, all except his eyes. His eyes were so deep a blue that they appeared almost coal-black like mother's, yet Daddy's eyes were full of hope, and warmth, and life. Things I think that my Mother must have lacked, growing up. 

When she and Daddy met, Mother was still young. Just out of boarding school, and living with a distant cousin in Switzerland. Daddy's employers had sent him there to research the provenance of an painting, and Mother's cousin was a professor of art history. They fell in love, married, and in the due course of time had me. I was born in New York City, where we lived perhaps half the time. The rest of the year we traveled, going everywhere that Daddy's job sent him. We never had dogs, as dogs don't travel well. But Mother and I would often take in a stray cat for the length of our stay one place or another. Sometimes our furry friends ended up accompanying us to our next destination; more often, we found our kitties a new caregiver before we left. 

I never went to school; it would have been pointless, given our lifestyle. I had private tutors, generally a new one in each place where we lived. It involved a certain period of work-up, but it allowed me to learn by immersion. My tutors only spoke English when we were in English speaking countries, as a rule. 

My parents taught me, as well. Daddy loved history, and I explored the museums and great cultural meccas of the world at his side, my small hand clasped in his. He would also take me to courtrooms, parliaments, senates, and public debates. 

"No person can ever be wholly good, Selena," he would explain to me, "But we owe it to ourselves and others to do our best, and to try to leave the world a better place than we found it." 

My Mother taught me...other things. How to escape from anywhere. How to survive on my own in any locale. How to fight. Why or how she knew these things, I never learned. When you're handed your first lock-pick around the same time that you're handed your first doll, it's not a question that you ask right away. But I did know, even then, that there was a fierce side to Mother. Mother was a survivor, and while Daddy taught me appreciation for and respect towards my fellow man, Mother taught me to act, rather than just react. I loved them both, although they had fundamentally differing viewpoints on almost all of life's important questions. I never doubted that they both loved me. 

Ironically, it was Daddy whose activities brought death to our door, one star-lit evening in South America when I was just thirteen. It was very cold that night. The chill prompted our current cat, Murcielaguito (named "Little Bat," for his big ears and high-pitched mews) to seek refuge with me in my bed. His cold nose on my wrist woke me, and I arose to get an extra blanket out of my closet. If not for that, I might have been asleep, and I would have died then. One could even say that I became Catwoman because of a Cat named Bat and a blanket. I told Bruce that once, or rather Batman, before he became Bruce. He's told me since that he had thought at the time that I was being flippant, rather than merely incoherent. That's why he glared at me, and tried to take me down even though he didn't particularly approve of the blood diamonds I'd stolen that night staying in the misery-stained hands of a prosperous death-dealer, either. 

But it wasn't just the blanket that saved me. It was that Mother had drilled me, each time we moved, in how to escape from our home, to somewhere safe. 

"Don't wake us up, Selena." She had repeated endlessly. "If we haven't come for you by the time you hear broken glass or screaming, then we are detained. Make your own way to our rendezvous point. And if we don't meet you within an hour, go someplace else in the nearest large city that appeals to you. If we are alive, we will find you." 

That cold star-lit night I heard screams and the sound of bullets, and so I fled as I'd been trained. Out the window I ran on silent feet, making a difficult jump to a neighboring building's balcony. Then through the neighbor's sleeping house, and out a back way. Onto a bus, and then three different bus rides to an all-night restaurant. Two strong cups of coffee earned by longing looks at the just-made pot, and then I was on my way to a cat zoo as the sun rose on a clear, sunny morn. My parents would have known where to find me, but they would have had to think about it. 

They never came. My Mother, in her paranoid wisdom, had told me what to do in that eventuality, as well. She'd given me names, contact information for people whom she had trusted to look out for me. None of them were in South America, but I'd learned enough of how to get from one place to another without funds from Mother. The fact that I was a pretty young girl who looked several years older than her age took care of the rest. I learned caution, though, on that trip. Nothing bad happened to me, but it was as much luck as skill. It was a lesson that I would take to heart. 

It was in Madrid that I met the first of Mother's 'friends.' It turned out that he was not a friend of my Mother's, but rather an old acquaintance of my grandfather's. I'd never known - nor even known of- my maternal grandfather. My parents had never mentioned him. But apparently, or at least according to everyone I ever met who knew him, he'd been a great man, during the Great War. I took from that information that he'd probably died young. It's hard to be commonly regarded as a great man if you live to any respectable age. 

My Grandfather's friend kept a roof over my head, took care of all of my material needs, and continued my education. If his teachings skewed more to Mother's end of the spectrum, well, at that point in my life, that just seemed reasonable. But he would not help me find out what had happened to my parents, no matter how much I pestered. 

"They are dead, and you are alive." He told me, "The best way to honor them is to stay that way." 

It was good advice, but I was thirteen and angry and passionate about my goals. Not to mention leery of growing close to anyone else. So I drifted on from Madrid in time, and I don't think that he ever searched for me, or even thought of me again. 

I found my own teachers, after that. What I already knew made it so that I was very much in demand, as a thief and confidence woman. I lived in Paris, and in Hong Kong. I worked jobs in in those places, and throughout different parts of Europe, Russia, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and America. But it was in Switzerland, that I first learned what had happened to my parents. I was sixteen. 

"A troublesome insurance investigator came up with a nonsense theory that this painting was stolen during the War, rather than purchased legitimately by my client from a procurer." The gentleman with dark glasses explained to the forger I was working with, at the time. "We need to steal the agent's notes, and replace them with something more...tentative. So that the insurance company does not suspect the substitution." 

It was my job to steal the notes. I had taken on the commission because it dealt with the object d' art my father had been researching when he died. Years I'd wasted searching for something in my Mother's past that had caused armed men to murder my parents in the dead of night, and all that time it had been my father's attention to detail and moral rectitude which had attracted that kind of attention. 

I did my job; I stole the notes. But only after reviewing the case that my father's company had against the current owner, and realizing that it was too weak to win, even given my father's sterling reputation. And I had my co-worker, the forger, make a copy of the notes in my father's hand. Those I gave to the gentleman in dark glasses. The original I kept. 

My parents would not have wanted me to die to avenge them. And I had no doubt that I'd end up dead, if I pursued their killers directly. And probably not just dead, but likely raped and tortured first, since the previous patriarch of the family, an old-fashioned traditionalist who believed in killing cleanly, had recently passed away. His oldest son, the current leader of that old mafioso family, was a creep of an entirely different color. 

So instead, I networked. I found other people with a grudge against the crime family whom my father had attempted to lawfully deprive of that object d'art, and I worked with them. We got the creep convicted of murdering a child (which he had). To pay for the defense of his good name, he sold the object d'art. After a suitable period of time, I stole it from the new owner (who blamed the creep). After another suitable period of time, I anonymously donated the object d'art in question to the national museum of the country which its long-ago maker had called home. It would have been bad publicity for the 'rightful' owner to reclaim it, and he never tried. 

It wasn't perfect justice, but it's an imperfect world. And it was still enough to bring some heat on me. Enough that I decided to relocate to America. I ended up in Gotham, which in addition to famous criminals, contains a rather large elite with many lovely things that they don't particularly need, and cannot necessarily distinguish from a good fake. In order to further distance myself from my recent actions, I wore a Cat costume while I was out and about, relieving the rich of trinkets and conning the more vicious into not gouging me too badly on the fence. After all, I was quite young in those days. Not even yet eighteen years old, although my driver's license, with the brand-new last name of Kyle, said twenty-two. 

The cat costume wasn't a random choice, but I didn't set out to become "The Catwoman." Rather, I felt at first that I needed a gimmick to differentiate Selina Kyle from the Selina who had caused so much trouble for the rotten scion of a fine old crime family in Europe. It ended up being a serendipitous choice, for a number of reasons. But I made it based on a simple fondness for cats, rather than to be a woman who emulated them. 

I'd always been fond of cats; was then and still am. When my life has permitted me to have cats as companions, I've gone to the local animal shelter and picked two out. When I am in motion, whether fighting or dancing or even just walking, I've often thought of cats. Not tried to emulate them, exactly. I'm not sure that a human really can. But if it is possible to internalize that grace and economy of motion, than perhaps I've tried. 

I figured that if there were already so many costumed criminals running around Gotham, what was one more? To seem more like the real deal (and not at all like the woman who just took down a mob boss over the ocean), I only stole items with some connection to cats. 

I'm not really sure that I knew what I was getting into. Certainly I did not plan to meet a gigantic, law-and-order obsessed Batman on a rooftop. Nor did I expect to fall in love with him. Nor to love him throughout all the vicissitudes of our lives. I didn't expect to come to care about his 'family,' or to play the role of stepmother to his brood of strays. 

But life is a string of unexpected occurrences. It's how we react to them that determines the course of our lives. And your life is not a single test that you pass or fail. You can fail many times, and still have the chance to get it right when it matters the most.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is also posted as the first chapter in a Batman/Whitecollar crossover, where Neal Caffrey is the son of Selina and Bruce. Feel free to check it out if you're interested.


End file.
